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Understanding the origin of chirality in nature has been an active area of research since the time of Pasteur. In this chapter we examine one possible route by which this asymmetry could have arisen, namely chiral-specific chemistry induced by spin-polarized electrons. The various sources of spin-polarized electrons (parity violation, photoemission, and secondary processes) are discussed. Experiments aimed at exploring these interactions are reviewed starting with those based on the Vester–Ulbricht hypothesis through recent studies of spin polarized secondary electrons from a magnetic substrate. We will conclude with a discussion of possible new avenues of research that could impact this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bayesian estimation method using Markov chain Monte Carlo is proposed for a multivariate stochastic volatility model that is a natural extension of the univariate stochastic volatility model with leverage, where we further incorporate cross leverage effects among stock returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper,we investigate the statistical properties of the Shanghai stock exchange index(SSEI). A GARCH-M(3,4) model and a TARCH-M(3,4) model successfully capture non-linear structure and asymmetries in the conditional mean and conditional variance. The TARCH-M(3,4) model is better in term of forecasting performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we identify duplicated genes in five mammalian genomes and classify these duplicates based on the mechanisms by which they were generated. Retrotransposition accounts for at least half of all predicted duplicate genes in these genomes, with tandem and interspersed duplicates comprising the other half. Estimation of the evolutionary rates in each class revealed greater rate asymmetry between retrotransposed and interspersed segmental duplicate pairs than between tandem duplicates, suggesting that retrotransposed and interspersed segmental duplicates are diverging more quickly. In an attempt to understand the basis of this asymmetry we identified disruption of flanking DNA as an indicator of new duplicate fate. Loss of synteny accelerates the asymmetry of divergence of DNA-mediated duplicates duplicates. These findings suggest that the differential evolution of duplicate genes may be significantly influenced by changes in local genome architecture and synteny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reality of globalized media critically influences the terrorist threat by increasing the “inequality of arms” [7] between terrorism and counterterrorism. Such concerns can never overshadow the innumerable benefits of global communication networks in most areas of human activity, but, as long as counterterrorism is considered a priority, these concerns do need to be taken into consideration. They have a bearing on any decisions which may have a direct or indirect impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three Kingdoms, the first Chinese novel and part of the cultural heritage of both China and Vietnam, begins with the famous lines, “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” Our review of the vicissitudes of the relationship between China and Vietnam could yield the same conclusion concerning asymmetric relations. The relationship has experienced an impressive variety of forms. Given the changes in the past, one must ask whether the present age of normalcy is the final resting place of the relationship or merely the most recent phase. Of course, reviewing the grand sweep of history can cause a loss of existential perspective. If normalcy lasts only as long as French colonialism in Vietnam, it would frame the life experience of three generations. If it lasts as long as the phase of traditional unequal empires, then it would end when the millennium that we are now beginning has grown old. Moreover, although normalcy does not resolve the tensions inherent in asymmetry, it also does not have an obvious internal contradiction that would shorten its span. It would be far more reasonable to predict, as Alexander Woodside did in 1979, that a period of hostility would lead to a mutually frustrating stalemate and thence to a (relatively) early normalization. If we are to try to gauge when “mature asymmetry” might pass into old age and death, we will have to locate an aging process or to analyze what factors might cause it to have a fatal accident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the nineteenth century, the relationship between China and Vietnam was largely unaffected by third-party relationships, and it was managed within a common cultural framework. The greater firepower of Western imperialism and its interest in transformative domination destroyed the traditional context of the relationship. Asymmetry and its effects did not disappear. Both China and Vietnam were clearly in asymmetric relations with the West, and the military and cultural disjunction reduced the relationship to a physical collision of unequal capacities. China and Vietnam related to Western imperialism as the earth might relate to the impact of a large asteroid. The Western impact was a different kind of shock for China than it was for Vietnam, because for the first time in China's civilizational memory it was not the center of its world. From its experiences with nomadic groups, China was accustomed to occasional relative weakness, but it was not accustomed to relative insignificance. For Vietnam, the traditions of patriotic resistance to the Chinese could be re-targeted toward France, as could opportunistic habits of learning from and collaborating with the powerful. Distracted from their mutual differences and sharing similar burdens of oppression, China and Vietnam moved from a face-to-face relationship to a shoulder-to-shoulder one. For the first time Vietnam faced an international challenge more important than China, and for the first time China had to face a world that laughed at its presumptions of centricity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the declaration of the Empire of Dai Co Viet by Dinh Bo Linh (Dinh Tien Hoang) in 968, and especially with the Song Dynasty's recognition of Dinh as King of Giaozhi in 975, contact between China and Vietnam entered the realm of international relations. But relations between China and Vietnam over the next thousand years do not fit the stereotypes of contemporary thinking about international relations. Nations are often imagined to be sovereign units confronting one another like knights on a field of battle. First, they are assumed to be unitary actors, usually personified by the leader or the capital city – “Beijing thinks this … Hanoi does that.” Second, the internal structure, identity, and values of each presumably are not influenced by the others. Like balls colliding on a pool table, states remain unaffected by the other states they strike, except that their trajectory will change and they may be destroyed by the collision. Third, it is axiomatic that states will contend for power, because if one state is clearly stronger than another, it will dominate the weaker one. If a state is vulnerable to a stronger adversary, it will either collude with other states in order to balance the adversary's advantage, or it will submit. Each of these three expectations is well grounded in the essential characteristics of sovereignty as it has been understood in the West since Machiavelli. The minimum condition for the existence of a state is that it controls territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the establishment of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, and the arrival of the People's Liberation Army at the Vietnam border in December, a new era began of intense and intimate cooperation between China and Vietnam. Party-to-party relations between the Vietnam Workers Party (VWP) and the Chinese Communist Party formed the core of the relationship, while state-to-state relations between the People's Republic of China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, established in January 1950, provided the public form. Of course, the situations of China and Vietnam over the next twenty-five years were quite different. China had finished its civil war in 1949 and had stabilized by 1952. Its major troubles of the period were largely self-imposed: the Great Leap Forward of 1958–60 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–69. Only after Mao Zedong's death in 1976 could China begin to change its leftist policies. By contrast, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1950 was still waging a desperate war with French colonial forces. Over the next four years, with Chinese help, it grew into a major and finally a victorious challenge to colonialism, and then became the government of northern Vietnam. In the 1960s the effort to reunify Vietnam began again, and in 1965–73 American direct intervention greatly increased the costs and risks of the war effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first three millennia of their relationship, China and Vietnam have been through almost every conceivable pattern of interaction among neighbors. Even in the past fifty years, the relationship has swung from intimate friendship to implacable enmity, and at each extreme the Sino-Vietnamese relationship became the defining relationship for different phases of Southeast Asian regional politics and a major element of global international relations. Although the success of normalization since 1991 has taken the relationship out of world headlines, the stability of relations between China and Vietnam remains an essential part of the foundation of international order in Asia. The one constant in relations between China and Vietnam since the unification of the Chinese empire in 221 bc has been that China is always much the larger partner. Regardless of whether the relationship was hostile, friendly, or in between, it has been asymmetric. China has always been a much more important presence for Vietnam than Vietnam has been for China, and Vietnam has had a more acute sense of the risks and opportunities offered by the relationship. Given the great disparity between China and Vietnam, one might expect that either Vietnam would be subservient to China or that China would annex Vietnam. In fact, however, even though Vietnam was formally a part of China for a millennium it was never fully “domesticated,” and for most of the last thousand years the relationship has been a negotiated one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of relations between China and Vietnam is a major focus of this study. Our research concerns the interactive changes in China and Vietnam over the course of their development, and history is the record of these changes. However, the perspective taken is not that of a historian. Rather than presenting a narrative of the relationship, we shall look in the historical record for its structure. The task here is not history but the utilization of history as part of an attempt to understand comprehensively the pattern of an asymmetric relationship. Chinese and Vietnamese authors are often concerned with the origins of their present polity – “How did we get here?” For Chinese studies, Vietnam plays a marginal role if it is noticed at all. For Vietnam, China is the foil for the development of Vietnamese nationhood. What will be stressed in this chapter is that in the beginning both polities were in a state of flux, and their interactions helped shape domestic developments and each polity's notion of itself. This is more obvious in the case of Vietnam, but Vietnam has also been an important influence on the course of China's development. For the sake of convenience, “Vietnam” and “the Vietnamese” shall be used to denote the current territory of Vietnam and its residents, and the same will be done with “China” and “the Chinese,” as well as present-day provinces such as Guangxi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The previous two chapters have provided descriptions of the basic parameters of the politics of China and Vietnam. To complete our examination of the fundamentals underlying the relationship, we need to consider the general characteristics of asymmetric relationships, because the disparity between China and Vietnam is the most striking feature of their relationship. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an analytical framework for interpreting the relationship of China and Vietnam. After we consider the history of Sino-Vietnamese relations in Part Two, we will return to a general analysis of the variety of asymmetric relations. China and Vietnam provide an archetypal case of asymmetry. The relationship is one of great disparities, all in China's favor, and it has been long term. Although not all asymmetric relations are between neighbors, shared borders imply a greater range of contact and therefore are usually more intense. Sino-Vietnamese relations have been through every possible variation from intimate friendship to implacable hostility, and indeed they have been through the full spectrum in the past forty years. Although the relationship has involved war on numerous occasions and the occupation of Vietnam by China, China has not been able to “solve” its differences with Vietnam by subjugating it. Whether in traditional times or in the present, China and Vietnam have usually managed their differences as autonomous but asymmetric political entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter I will discuss an episode from contemporary physics, that of atomic parity violation experiments and their relation to the Weinberg-Salam unified theory of electroweak interactions. This will continue my discussion of the interaction between experiment and theory and of the epistemology of experiment. It will also explore some of the differences between my view of science and that proposed by the “strong programme” or social constructivist view in the sociology of science. This strong programme view has been summarized by Trevor Pinch. In providing an explanation of the development of scientific knowledge, the sociologist should attempt to explain adherence to all beliefs about the natural world, whether perceived to be true or false, in a similar way What is being claimed is that many pictures [emphasis in original] can be painted, and furthermore, that the sociologist of science cannot say that any picture is a better representation of Nature than any other A central feature of this view is that change in the content of scientific knowledge is to be explained or understood in terms of the social and/or cognitive interests of the scientists involved. There is a sense in which I am in agreement with this symmetrical view. The evidence model I have suggested explains adherence to scientific beliefs in terms of their relationship to valid experimental evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE SUGGESTION OF V-A THEORY The situation discussed at the end of the last chapter was described in papers that proposed that a Universal Fermi Interaction, one that applied to all weak interactions, was a linear combination of V and A. The theory was offered by Sudarshan and Marshak (1957, 1958) and by Feynman and Gell-Mann (1958). This was exactly the opposite conclusion drawn four years earlier by Konopinski and Langer, who had stated, “As we shall interpret the evidence here, the correct law must be what is known as an STP combination” (1953, p. 261). Sudarshan and Marshak examined the available evidence from nuclear β decay and other weak interactions, including strange particle decays, and concluded that the only possible choice for a Universal Fermi Interaction was a linear combination of V and A, even though there was evidence apparently in conflict with this choice. The four experiments cited in opposition to the V-A theory were The electron–neutrino angular correlation experiment on He6 by Rustad and Ruby (1953, 1955), which gave T as the β-decay interaction. The sign of the electron polarization from muon decay. The frequency of the electron mode in pion decay. The asymmetry in polarized neutron decay, which was smaller than predicted. They suggested, All of these experiments should be redone, particularly since some of them contradict the results of other recent experiments on the weak interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A LIFE OF ITS OWN After the discussion of the previous six chapters, a reader might be strongly tempted to believe that experiment derives its meaning and significance solely from its relation to theory. We have mentioned the roles that experiment plays in confirming, refuting, and choosing between theories. We have also discussed the role of theory in the validation of experimental results. As Ian Hacking (1983) has pointed out, however, experiment often has a life of its own. Although we began our history of experiment and the theory of weak interactions with Fermi's (1934) theory of β decay, the subject had been studied experimentally for more than thirty years in the absence of any accepted theory of the phenomena. Similarly, from the discovery of superconductivity by Kamerlingh Omnes in 1911 until the phenomenological theory of London and London in 1935 the experimental study of the effect proceeded in the absence of any successful theory. In fact, one might argue that the experimental discovery of the Meissner effect, the exclusion of a magnetic field from the interior of a superconductor, was a crucial step for the development of the theory. This suggests another role for experiment, that of giving hints toward a successful theory. Sometimes experiments are done because the phenomena are seen to be interesting. In addition one might wish to acquire data that a future theory will have to explain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A skeptical reader, after reading the history presented in the first five chapters, might question whether or not science is the reasonable enterprise based on valid experimental evidence that I believe it is. They might say that the demonstrated fallibility of experimental results, of theoretical calculation, and of the comparison between experiment and theory casts serious doubt on that assertion. I agree that the fallibility is worrisome, but I also believe that the corrigibility shown gives us hope that science is indeed a reasonable enterprise. We not only learn from our mistakes, but we are able to correct them. In this chapter I will argue that we have good reasons for belief in the validity of experimental results. I will discuss later how we can use the results in the construction of a reasonable, dare one say, rational, science. THE BAYESIAN APPROACH TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE I will adopt a Bayesian approach to the philosophy of science. Bayesianism is based on the idea that we have degrees of belief in statements or hypotheses, and that these degrees of belief obey the probability calculus. [For an excellent introduction to the Bayesian view see Howson and Urbach (1989).] There has been considerable discussion of what kind of probabilities these are. I believe that they are subjective probabilities reflecting the judgments of scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 1956 and early 1957 the situation changed dramatically. Following a suggestion by Lee and Yang (1956) that parity, or mirror symmetry, might be violated in the weak interactions, which included β decay, a series of experiments by Wu and her collaborators (1957), by Garwin, Lederman, and Weinrich (1957), and by Friedman and Telegdi (1957a) showed conclusively that this was the case. This discovery had serious implications for the previous analyses of β decay, suggested new experiments, and pointed the way toward a new theory of β decay. We can summarize the history of this discovery as follows. During the 1950s the physics community was faced with what was known as the “θ–τ puzzle.” On one set of accepted criteria, that of identical masses and lifetimes, the θ and τ particles appeared to be the same particle. On another set of accepted criteria, that of spin and parity, they appeared to be different. The spin and parity analysis was performed on the decay products, two pions for the θ and three pions for the τ. Parity conservation was assumed in these decays and the spin and parity of the θ and τ were inferred. There were several attempts to solve this puzzle within the framework of currently accepted theories, but all of these were unsuccessful. In 1956, Lee and Yang recognized that a possible solution to the problem would be the nonconservation of parity in the weak interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What became known as the keynesian theory of international payments was not, to my knowledge, ever spelled out by Keynes. The marginal propensity to import, and then the multiplier, began to appear in the late 1930s and early 1940s, associated with the names of Harrod (1933), Machlup (1939, 1943), Metzler (1942a, 1942b), Neisser and Modigliani (1953), Paish (1936), and others. A detailed account of these is presented in Chapters 14 and 15 on “the keynesians.” The full-blown integration of keynesian macroeconomic theory with endogenous capital mobility, monetary changes, and some notion of balance of payments equilibrium (even of a short- or medium-run nature) did not appear until the 1950s, with Meade, Mundell, Fleming, and, with great qualification, Metzler, whom I discuss in Chapter 16. Keynes himself, after the Treatise and the Macmillan Committee testimony, which were roughly coeval, wrote nothing of importance on international economics except for the proposals and correspondence regarding the postwar monetary plans. These, however, constitute a major body of work expressing his views on the international monetary system and the problems he thought were likely to arise in the postwar period. While they are less formally expressed, more diffuse, and more “politically” oriented than the earlier writings I have discussed, they do reveal an analytical stance which is highly recognizable and worth exploring. In the letters and drafts (and redrafts) of plans for the postwar monetary system (Keynes 1940–4 [1980]) several themes are prevalent throughout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The committee The Committee on Finance and Industry was appointed on November 5, 1929, by the Chancellor of the Exchequer “to inquire into banking, finance and credit, paying regard to the factors both internal and international which govern their operation, and to make recommendations calculated to enable these agencies to promote the development of trade and commerce and the employment of labour” (Macmillan 1931: vi). It thus had a much broader frame of reference than the Cunliffe Committee, and, of course, sat at a very different time in British, and world, history. It convened for a much longer period than the Cunliffe Committee, and we have two large volumes of hearings and testimony, as well as a long and detailed report, which was presented in June 1931. Bradbury, now a Lord, was back. The economists in the group were T. E. Gregory and J. M. Keynes. The reports are separated by a period of thirteen years, the return to gold, and the beginnings of the greatest depression the world had, and has, ever known. They are distinguished from one another by a number of other characteristics as well: their length, the breadth of their terms of reference and hence the scope of their concerns, their view of the world, of economic adjustments in general and of balance of payments adjustment in particular, their perception of the actual and appropriate behavior of a central bank (or at least of a particular central bank, the Bank of England), and (only partly facetiously do I say this) by John Maynard Keynes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We may clarify this idea of an “important” confirming or refuting experiment, and the dependence of this importance on the theoretical context using Bayesian confirmation theory. Let D be the Dirac theory and e1 be the existence of the positron. Applying Bayes's Theorem, we get where P(e1|D) = 1 because D⊢e1. We can also write where ⌝D is the negation of D. Because no other theory, at the time, predicted the existence of the positron, we can set P(e1|⌝D) P(⌝D) = β, where β is very small. Thus, P(D|e1) = P(D)/(P(D) + β) ≈ 1 − ∈ ≈ 1, where ∈ = β/P(D) is also quite small. This confirms our intuition that observation of a result predicted by only one theory gives us very good reason to believe that theory. This is not, of course, the only type of important experiment. The examples discussed earlier of the experiments on parity nonconservation and CP violation provide an illustration of another type. These are experiments that eliminate competing hypotheses or theories while confirming one of the alternatives. These also provide substantial confirmation. We now set P(D|e1) = P1(D), the new prior probability of D. Let us now consider that happens to our belief in D when e2, the symmetric double scattering of electrons, is observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter is an introduction to the book. It explains why decision making under uncertainty involves special challenges which cannot be dealt with using the traditional production economic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory design (PD) has taken as its ideal that designers and users should engage in an equal language game. When we apply PD in contexts where some of the users involved are weak, ill, or have impairments, this assumed equality can no longer be an ideal. The workshop explores new ideals for participatory design in non-work settings with highly heterogeneous user constellations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]